When the Europeans colonized the Global South, they not only appropriated tangible resources but also occupied and transformed the epistemological landscape to propound their narratives based on imperialist ideological foundations.
Introduction
Western colonialism in the 15th and 16th centuries manifested itself multifarious, each bearing distinctive consequences on the colonized. The discourse of knowledge as an exclusionary and exclusive prerogative and its projection as a European gift to the world needs no further elucidation to emphasize the consequences of the skewed narrative prevalent to this day. The Western Eurocentric modernity has been able to colonize knowledge systems and fields without any prudency to impose a classed, raced and gendered lens, which leads to dominant platforms controlling circuits of cultural production, deeming anything alien to it as nefarious, barbaric and redundant.
Epistemicide is a term coined by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his book, “Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide”. It refers to the phenomenon of the destruction of existing knowledge systems and the erasure of traditional and indigenous sources of knowledge to impose a Western intellectual discourse and wipe out any epistemology beyond the Eurocentric terrain of modernity.
Defining Epistemicide: Colonial Politics of Knowledge
When the Europeans colonized the Global South, they not only appropriated tangible resources but also occupied and transformed the epistemological landscape to propound their narratives based on imperialist ideological foundations. Epistemicide takes place in several ways. The knowledge that is grounded on ideologies different from the dominant one, as in the case of Third World knowledge, is by and largely silenced and erased. They will be starved of funding if the hegemonic power controls this aspect, as the Western powers do in this case, remain unpublished to limit their ideas into reaching larger audiences, unable to be taught in schools and universities and become unrecognizable even to the natives thus ensuring their rapid decline into oblivion.
Knowledge systems having partial social or cultural overlap with the dominant one, are instead cajoled into acceptable versions by assimilating prevalent versions and weeding out anything redundantly alien.
Viewed from the perspective of the marginalized and excluded, the historical record of global capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy narrates a tale of institutionalized and harmful delusion. It entails appropriation in the name of liberation, violence in the name of peace, destruction of life in the name of the sanctity of life, and violation of human rights in the name of protection of human rights. In an ambitious assertion, G. W. F. Hegel argued that world history moves from East to West, from despotism to enlightened democracy and finally to the realization that human nature is free. This Hegelian idea was behind the aspiration of “Americanization” of Europe and the rest of the world, as he attempted to justify European imperialism and exploitation of other geographical regions and communities.
The Three Waves of Epistemicide in the Long 16th Century
The story of dispossessing the people from ownership of their ideas in medieval and indigenous communities, which brought ecclesiastical power to Western institutions, traces its roots to three cycles of epistemicides in the 16th century. First, the conquest of Al-Andalus and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Europe. Second, the conquest of indigenous people of the Americas, started by the Spanish, and led by the French and English, is still ongoing today. And third, the creation of the slave trade resulted in millions being killed in Africa and more being completely dehumanized by enslavement in America.
What’s significant to note here is that all three conquests were both military as well as ideological/epistemological. During its heyday, the Al-Andalus empire in Europe, the city of Cordoba had a library of 500,000 books. This was at the time when other intellectual centres in Europe had libraries of 5,000 to 10,000 books. The Spanish burned the library of Cordoba and libraries elsewhere. They destroyed most of the codices of the Maya, Incan and Aztec empires as well. African slaves were portrayed as non-human, incapable of Western-styled thought, degraded and silenced and robbed of human sovereignty. Consequently, the Western monopoly of knowledge has taken over higher education institutions to the total absence of our traditional intellectual discourses.
What is Cognitive Justice and why is it imperative?
In a world immersed in appalling injustices of various dimensions, economic, social, legal, and historical, the rarely acknowledged type is the cognitive injustice; the failure to recognize different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. Boaventura emphasizes that global social justice would not be possible without global cognitive justice and argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalized knowledge and wisdom that has been in existence in the global South.
The idea of cognitive justice not only sensitizes us to new forms of knowledge but also to diverse communities and distinctive approaches. What’s offered then, is a democratic image of the world, non-competitive, all-inclusive and participatory, where conversation and reciprocity create knowledge not as a zero-sum view of the world, but one that nurtures new ways of thinking and problem-solving, a collaboration of memories, legacies and heritages.
Conceptualizing Knowledge Democracy; Decolonizing the narrative
Knowledge democracy refers to an interrelationship phenomenon. It acknowledges the importance of the existence of the multiple epistemologies or ways of knowing, how these frameworks contribute towards cognitive justice in intellectual discourse, and inculcating and mainstreaming the knowledge of the marginalized everywhere, sometimes referred to as the subaltern knowledge. Knowledge democracy is about open access for sharing of knowledge and about intentionally linking values of social justice, fairness and action to the process of using knowledge.
The project of decolonizing knowledge proceeds from the realization of the pitfalls and lacunae in history and belief in the idea that the future is an ideal that we should consistently reimagine for ourselves. The knowledge-creating powers of revolutionary movements of historically marginalized people are at the heart of the self-determining communities engaged in creating new social economies beyond the dominant political and intellectual structures.
Conclusion
Today, actualizing and working against epistemicide is crucial to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. The transformation of the world’s epistemological diversity into an empowering instrument against hegemonic globalization points towards a new dawn of bottom-up cosmopolitanism. It would promote intercultural themes and linkages, harmonize wide conversations of humankind celebrating conviviality, uniqueness and solidarity against the logic of market-ridden greed, hegemonic individualism, destruction of life by departing from eurocentric modernity and ending indigenous isolation.
